Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS - An awesome retro GPU 

Awww, man I totally forgot about that. Would have been awesome to include :D

That gpu is fire (literally)

Agree! You can run today games on a GTX 480/580. Not on the highest setting, but you can run it on pretty decent looking graphics. Very few games fom 2007 can run on a GF2 GTS from 2000. And maybe that's a good thing. A greater focus on implementing the modern much higher compute power for other things, than just suck as much money out of gamers. As far as I know... Life does not get better with prettier graphics in games. But maybe it can get better, if we use the power for other beneficial science stuff.

I remember Unreal Tournament 2003 already being practically unplayable on my GeForce 2 GTS. It's why I upgraded to a GeForce 4 Ti4600 in late 2002. If you look at various RU-vid videos, you can see that games from 2004 like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 will barely even run on a GeForce 2. Cards from this era got outdated so ridiculously fast.

Strangely, a Radeon 97/9800 Pro can do games up to around 2007 or 2008 or so.

That's a disgusting price, even given the inflation rate. Over here it was around £200 for a GTS Pro on launch, around 250 euros? Lets call it 320 given inflation. For 500 euros you could have had a Geforce 2 Ultra, which was WAY overpriced back in the day. Looks like the Italians got bumfucked regarding parts back then.

shit dude that cards still 30-50 bucks online.

@@swahiliranger1022 picked one up for 7,50 local lol

I vividly remember that it run Black & White really well, unlike Voodo 2

My Geforce2 still moving RU-vid at 720p

@@SargentoDuke bro stuck in 2001

32 bit colour was much better on Geforce rather than the TNT series, but ATI had amazing 32bit colour support long before Geforce ever came around. I remember my Rage 128 Ultra barely lost any FPS in GP500 when switching between 32 and 16 bit colour. It wasn't until Geforce 3 came around that Nvidia started to catch ATI with feasible 32bit support.

Mine was the 64mb version as well. Got it when it was already kind of old, as a cheap option instead of a geforce 3

God that you missed the actual graphics decelerator, the S3 Virge.

Imho is that 99.99% of those people (subs) are not the sharpest knives available. This is a great channel for us enthusiasts that enjoy facts over la-la-land. Brings back great memories to see these parts from the past!

Any idea if it will play ff7 the old PC version?

"and the difference between Hardware and Software T&L is dramatic on slower CPUs. It's pretty much a 100% performance boost in my particular case, since the GPU is so much more powerful than the CPU is" talk more!

@@polariszene8542 I haven't tried that out, but I do have the FF7 demo kicking around on an old magazine cover disc somewhere. My guess is that it will probably need older drivers to work properly.

Vasileios yeah between 2003 to 2006 pc gaming was pritty lame, bad console ports. It wasnt until crysis came out that ot got me back to pc gaming

Are you crazy haha 2004 alone had far cry doom 3 Rome total war half life 2 the chronicals of riddick unreal tournament 2004 etc..

Thank you for sharing, great story 👍

Great find!

I had it too. It was in my first PC. CPU was AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz. I bought the CPU as 1.2 but it was easy to clock it 200Mhz higher. Those were the days.

According to this video, you shouldn't say just "Only" 😂 that memory overclock test made a notable difference

There will be a V5 video at some point. But it needs an older motherboard, so it will get a unique test build, plus a few cards to compare it against, but this means a lot more work and time, so not sure when I get around to it.

Thank you! Yea looks like I will do a video on 32 MB vs 64 MB :)

Super Gute Arbeit!

Ok, cool!

Yeah, the FX series was a huge misstep. So glad ATI struck back with the Radeon 9K series...

Ah yes, the blue Hercules cards, very nice.

You are correct. I used this function in one of my OpenGL homework in 2004 I think. I used it to get proper cube map reflection while being able to control how much reflection there was and how much of the base colour would be kept. IIRC the OpenGL extension was originally called register combiners and was later promoted to core OpenGL. www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Texture_Combiners www.nvidia.in/object/programmable_texture_blending.html

I'll see. It would be a super short video though :D

32MB vs 64MB is a tricky thing to benchmark. I remember many websites back then claiming 64MB were useless. However if you use the correct approach you can see the difference. You need to benchmark not just the average frame rate, but the minimum one too. When a 3D card runs out of memory due to the frame buffer usage and texture usage, the card will start to struggle and will copy the textures back and forth between the system memory and the card memory (aka texture trashing). en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science) The q3dm9 map in Quake 3 for example has a few sections where 32MB is just not enough and the frame rate collapses from 40fps to 5fps. It got better once NVIDIA correctly implemented AGP texturing in their later drivers, lowering the need to transfer the textures back and forth as the textures could be directly accessed via the AGP bus. Nonetheless there is still a perceivable difference. I remember the perfect spot in q3dm9 to observe this difference. I'll also believe some people made some demos showing this problem. For example Quaver demo: alt.3dcenter.org/downloads/quake3-quaver.php Be sure to disable texture compression and push the texture quality to the max.

PhilsComputerLab please do. See comment above :-)

You can see Anandtech article for some benchmarks on this www.anandtech.com/show/523/11

Yea will do. So it appears that the 64 MB version I have is just plain faster. It likely has better memory / faster timings. But I think I found a good way to structure the video. But yea, I haven't done anything yet, just thinking.

Heheh, I actually got the GTS version of that card maybe 2 years ago. Threw it in a machine with a P3-600. I should probably turn that on again one of these days.

I have the Ti version now, as I collect cards, tried to get the pro again, but couldn't find one in the leadtek version :)

They

Basically, it's a GF3 with _GF4_-like specs.

SolarstrikeVG It's between the Geforce3 and Geforce 3 Ti 500. And it has slow memory, because it shares 64 MB DDR RAM with the rest of the system.

Oh.

That was what I wanted to test. On a GeForce256, the hardware TnL hold you back with a fast CPU. But not on the GeForce2, it has much stronger TnL.

Ok, now I can see your point. Much higher GPU clock and poor memory performance on GF2 may be the cause.

Does it have a CPU...? LOL

xp 1900+ on asus kt 266a chipset, have a few later xp cpu's and boards but these are 2001 earlier i chosen to use

Ching-Chen Huang The Geforce 2 GTS was faster than the Voodoo 5500 but the difference was small, Voodoo 5500 is a little bit faster than Geforce 256 DDR. FSAA is alot better on the Voodoo 5500 than on any Geforce 2.

Ultra fast :D

Yes the card came in various configurations. Some with DVI, some with TV out or both.

Haven't noticed anything. Once the games are activated once, I just use Steam in offline mode when benchmarking.

I've even went as far as using Discord in a Firefox browser in XP in a pinch and haven't had any issues. Probably should have just installed a light version of Linux tbh, but I was lazy. : P As long as you're limiting your access to servers you can trust (eg. _don't_ go browsing the deep web and downloading files left and right!), you shouldn't be able to pick anything up. An adblocker is also probably a must. Heck, I've got a 98 machine that technically gets internet access because it shares files over a network (and I can't find out how to make it stop connecting to the internet without disabling the file access), but I make a habit of disabling the ethernet card whenever I'm done transferring the files--no hits so far. (There's nothing of importance on the machine anyway.)

Edmundo "Get a virus within 10 seconds of connecting XP to the internet". That's pure bullshit. I haven't updated Windows 7 since 2011, so I'm supposed to get 99999999999 viruses? NOPE! I've never got a virus on my outdated copy of Win7, so XP should be perfectly safe as long as you don't act like an idiot on the internet. Just don't click any suspicious links or (definitely not) ads.

PhilsComputerLab Thanks for the info!

Licentious Howler Thanks, I'm thinking about building an XP system for old games. It seems opera is still well supported for the future. Would only use if for very basic downloads and windows updates with no logins or emails.

Lots of things to consider, not an easy answer.

True that... A bit more power, or going era correct.

GF3 will be faster and has more VRAM, so if you already have one, that would be an easy choice.

Also cpu p3 Tualatin 1.4 ghz 512 mb ram

FanATIcs probably.

Of course it does. Halo runs already on geforce 1. Piece of cake.

@@carbonara2144 I was making a reference to the old halo nvidia ad. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-meLg7jSHT20.html

@@slipangle3027 Awesome :) I learned something today.

I'm not sure if there was much better memory available at the time?

I'm not referring to superfast 4ns or 3.3ns ddram. I'm talking about lower tier ddram wich AIB manufacturers chose to use for cost savings. Most of the cards were shipped NEC, Eltron, and some mitsubishi and panasonic wich had really lose timings. Geforce 2 was memory bandwidth starved and the loose timing hit the perfomance really hard.

Apart from BIOS tools, is there a way to show the memory timings? The card I have uses Infineon memory.

I have both the Gf2 GTS and radeon 7200 ,both in 64mb dram variant.(gts is clocked 200 core and 166 mem /and 7200 is clocked 166 core 166 mem). But the gts has the nec ic and 7200 has the samsung ic . Both stock and radeon is faster in 98% of games ,wich it shouldn't be. Nec has way to loose timings and samsung has decent/tight timings for 166mhz .

check on google the ic mem. id. In data sheets you'll find the timing wich those mem. are rated for use.

Too bad Vega turned out to be a disappointment...